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It's time to augment the tinfoil hats with tinfoil suits! I bet that stops the microwaves from their 1/64" penetration. Of course, you're not very stealthy in your shining armor...

I'll get my tinfol hat then,... eh, tinfoil suit I mean.

It is actually amazing that they can talk about "without causing injury" and "minimises collateral damage" in the same piece. I always thought that collateral damage was just an euphemism for generating dead bodies not intended to be killed...

-- Greetings Bertho

Ok, last one. Steel yourself for it:

I can predict the commentary on this article - liberal extremists soft in mind and body protesting that this is just a weapon that the evil government is going to use to torture people. I even see a comment that the inventors of such a device should be forced to use it on their children to see how it can torture people.

Well, anything can be a torture device and cause horrific pain and suffering, from a billiard ball in a sock to a rifle. Banning potentially useful law enforcement devices because they can be used inappropriately is typical of the sadly pathetic and lazily hopolophobic mindset that believes in criminalizing things, not actions. Of course the effects of microwave guns are going to have to be extensively studied.

In fact, I personally think its a stupid idea. Our cops already have highly effective crowd-control technology. Its just this little thing called "inevitable random chance" that causes people in riots to get hurt no matter how "gentle" the law is trying to be and how well trained they are. And all the armchair commentators who can't accept this, that in a large, violent, and chaotic situation, people are going to get hurt, encourage the development of more and more complex (and therefore unreliable) technologies like this microwave gun. As if the neccessary use of force is ever going to be 110% safe like they want.

How do they know it's not "rare Yorkshire chromosome discovered in Africa" - by 'eck ? Sithee, Mike

"On finding the west African artefact in one individual, researchers were able to recruit six other men with the same surname, and assign all of them to the rare haplogroup, which previously had only 25 known members worldwide, all of whom were African."

Which could, of course, just as readily mean that some obscure Yorkshireman got some African girl(s) pregnant, since the 18th century. One Yorkshireman working for a slaver company in the 18th century, or for the Raj in the following century, would have had ample opportunity to start paternal lines, possibly in several distinct places, in West Africa; while his brothers kept his Y chromosome going back home. If we could identify the most recent common paternal-ancestor of the Africans involved, and he predates British intrusions into Africa, we'd have a compelling argument for believing the chromosome came from Africa to Yorkshire; however, we probably don't have such detailed records of births and marriages for the Africans' paternal-ancestry as we do for our Yorkshiremen (leaving aside the quite general problems with how such records relate to paternity). So this may actually be a Yorkshire artefact which was first discovered in West Africa and only subsequently in its land of origin.

What we know is: we have a few Yorkshiremen with an 18th century common ancestor; and a few (but not quite as few) Africans with whom they share Y chromosome; which implies a common ancestor in their paternal-ancestry tree. This doesn't tell us whether that common ancestor was a Yorkshireman or an African.

A very careful study of the "alleged-paternal ancestral" trees of all involved might yield some clues - each mutation-or-misallegation should show up through sub-trees of alleged brothers having different Y chromosomes; and we can safely assume that the actual paternal-ancestral tree genuinely has one root at which the mutation arose - but only in so far as relevant records exist to establish the trees.

Apparently "Forbidden Zone" is on channel M6, which is available in HD on satellite Astra 1G. If any Reg readers work out how to get this on a standard Sky dish/HD box, it would be your public duty to share...

John

Get to it, then. And when you know, there's a few hacks at Vulture Central who'd pay good money for the info too...see you next week. ®